class notes

Channeling Outrage

Cartoonist Tom Toles keeps his pencils sharp

By Robert L. Kaiser

“I am infuriated by many things. Top among them is the way we botched the climate challenge.”

Tom Toles, BA ’73

With his angular face and shoulder-length red hair—a
frizzy mane that hasn’t been touched by scissors in a year
and a half—Tom Toles, 63, looks a little like a lion.

On this snowy February evening, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post is
one of four UB alumni in the news media participating in a panel
discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In
attendance are 70 other UB alumni. Many have come for Toles (BA
’73), and they won’t leave disappointed. Some are
laughing so hard at his wry comments they seem nearly unhinged.

But if Toles is
having the same effect on this audience that he has on his readers,
it stands to reason that some here are doing a slow burn. Sure
enough, midway through the program, a 1956 med school alumnus in
the second row starts jawing with Toles about Bill O’Reilly
and his recently disproven claims to have reported from war zones.
The man believes O’Reilly is telling the truth and is utterly
unmoved by evidence to the contrary unearthed by a Village Voice
reporter—and Toles can’t let it go.

“You can shake and nod your head any way you want,”
the cartoonist says, “but he reported what Bill
O’Reilly actually said and could prove it.”

As a political cartoonist, moral outrage is Toles’
currency. “I am infuriated by many things,” he says.
“Top among them is the way we’ve botched the climate
challenge. This one was our responsibility, and we dropped the
ball.”

The outrage works both ways. A woman once wrote to Toles:
“I happen to think Mr. Bush is a fine-looking man and your
portrait of him makes him look like some kind of little animal. I
think it is highly disrespectful of you to do this. His ears are on
his head in the same place as everyone else’s.”

This winter the outrage that circulates around political
cartooning spiraled out of control, ending in the shooting deaths
of French journalists at Charlie Hebdo for the perceived blasphemy
of their cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Nobody should be
killed for expressing a view, Toles says. But what happened does
raise secondary questions about journalistic wisdom and worth. The
history of political cartooning isn’t without, as he puts it,
“bad actors spreading hate.”

On the day of the media panel, Toles catches the first train
into the city, a 10-minute ride. Soon he’ll have a different
morning routine. He’ll be back in Buffalo per an agreement
with the Post allowing him to work summers in his hometown. He and
his wife, Gretchen (BA ’73), love Buffalo, he says.
“There’s just something kind of lovable about it. The
way people are in a snowstorm— they drop what they’re
doing and help each other get through it.”

It would appear that Toles’ vision of the world and how it
ought to be—a vision that says much about what and whom he
takes issue with—is informed at least in part by his
upbringing in the City of Good Neighbors. In his office, several
hours before the panel, he is taking issue with the minimum wage,
inking in a cartoon depicting one of the Wicked Witch’s
guards telling Dorothy: “The wicked 1% hired me at minimum
wage to guard her castle. The bucket of water is on the wall under
the torches.”

As Toles works, cars shush along the wet surface of 15th Street
four stories beneath his window. The Rapidograph in his long,
slender fingers makes a soft scratching noise on the paper like the
lick of a switchblade.